


Heart Like a Paper Scrap

by osprey_archer



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>‘Heart, you are as restless as a paper scrap,<br/>That’s tossed down dusty pavements by the wind…’</i>
</p><p>Mary and Matthew discuss poetry (and try very hard not to discuss their feelings) as Mary pushes Matthew around the grounds in his wheelchair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart Like a Paper Scrap

The lawn would have been raked clean of leaves quite promptly before the war. But now, with the staff so reduced, those rusty leaves crackled beneath the chair wheels as Mary pushed Matthew across the lawn. He plucked irritably at the blanket over his knees. “I don’t need this,” he said. “I’m a cripple, not an invalid.” 

“Doctor’s orders,” Mary replied. 

“Since when do you let anyone give you orders?” 

“When I agree with orders,” said Mary, “I follow them.” 

Matthew looked up at her. “You didn’t in the past.” 

Mary lifted her shoulders. “I’m growing up,” she said. “We all are. I suppose it’s time for it.”

Sweat trickled down Mary’s neck as she pushed. She had not expected to enjoy such exertion, but she was always happiest when she was pushing Matthew somewhere in his chair. Perhaps Sybil was right to insist that doing nothing was the enemy of happiness. 

A breeze swirled the leaves over the grass, pressing Mary’s skirt close about her ankles. A newspaper sheet fluttered with the leaves. “Poor Carson,” Mary said. “He would have vapors if he knew the standards had gone down so far that there should be litter on the grounds.” 

“I suppose one of the soldiers was reading it,” Matthew said. 

They fell silent, watching the newspaper slowly cartwheel across the lawn. For a moment the wind blew it upright, and even at that distance Mary recognized the masthead: it was one of Sir Richard’s papers. She hadn’t thought of him for days. 

The thought pricked her heart, or perhaps her conscience. Surely one ought to think about one’s fiance without being reminded by a blowing bit of paper. 

“ ‘Heart, you are as restless as a paper scrap,  
That’s tossed down dusty pavements by the wind…’” Mary murmured. 

Matthew stirred. “That’s Rupert Brooke,” he said, surprised. 

The wind died down, depositing the newspaper on the leaves. “You know the poem?” Mary asked. 

“I’ve read most of Brooke’s work,” Matthew said, and smiled up at her. “I didn’t know you liked poetry.”

Mary shook her head and began to push his chair again. “Edith is our poetess.”

“And you can’t like poetry if Edith does?”

“I must leave her the palm in _something_.”

“Oh? Are you so sure you would be a better poetess?” he teased. 

Mary opened her mouth to retort, then closed it. She pushed the chair across the crackling leaves and said, “No. I might write epigrams, but serious poetry...no. Of course,” she said, “that doesn’t mean Edith would be any good at it, either.”

“I always thought Sybil more the poetess kind,” Matthew agreed. 

The wind picked up again, so that both leaves and paper blew across the lawn again. “Sybil’s much too practical for that,” Mary said. 

“I suppose she is,” Matthew said. He sounded a little surprised. “But poets can be revolutionary. I should think Sybil would like that.” 

Mary smiled, although she felt another little pinprick at the thought of Sybil’s revolutionary tendencies. But surely Sybil would be too practical to run off with the chauffeur in the end. To give up everything, to live in a ghastly little flat and wear drab ready-made clothes and live largely on potatoes; it was unthinkable. Sybil could not go through with it.

Still Mary felt uneasy. “Don’t encourage her,” she said. 

“Not if you don’t want me to,” Matthew said, and tilted back his head to look at her. 

A leaf spiraled down from an oak into his lap, and he held it up by its stem. “Here,” he said, and Mary came around the chair and lowered her head so he could put the leaf in her hair like a flower. A lock of hair fell from her coiffure against her neck. 

“Don’t disarrange it too much,” she said. “Anna’s quite busy enough.”

“It’s all done,” Matthew said. Mary straightened up, smoothing her hair in place again and poking at the leaf. It stood up out of her hair like an aigrette.

“Perhaps I shall start a new fashion,” she said. 

“Probably,” he said, smiling at up her. With the gold and red trees and the gray sky, his eyes seemed very blue.

Mary moved away from him. “You’ll have to get one for Lavinia,” she said lightly, and began to push the chair again. 

Matthew settled back under the blanket and plucked at it irritably again. “Do you remember the rest of it?” he asked. “The poem you quoted earlier.”

“I’m afraid not,” Mary said. She had read the poem perhaps a year after she met Matthew, and the first two lines seemed to describe so exactly her feelings that she could not get them out of her head. But the rest was gone. “I met Rupert Brooke at a house party once, did you know?”

“Did you?” said Matthew, with quickening interest. “I wish I could have met him. What was he like?”

“He looked a lot like you,” she said. “Except more handsome, of course.” Matthew laughed, and she pushed his chair onward, and expanded. “He walked in beauty, like the night…”

Matthew laughed again, but with an edge this time. “Did he now?”

“Yes; but he certainly didn’t have ‘a heart whose love is innocent,’ as Byron puts it,” she said, and leaned low over his shoulder to confide. “He was…”

But her voice dwindled, because Rupert Brooke was dead, like so many of the rest of them, and it seemed suddenly unbearable that someone so young and vital and irritating could be dead. “He died in Greece,” she said instead. “Like Byron.”

Abruptly the laughter left Matthew’s face, and his expression closed inward. “Lucky him.”

Mary did not know what to say to him when he was like this: it was like standing on the shore and watching someone drown, knowing there was no one within league who knew how to swim. “Cousin Matthew,” she began. She was not sure what to say, but she simply went on. “I know it’s not easy for you. But I will never, none of us will ever, be sorry that you’re alive, because I - ” _love you_ , she almost said. But for once she swallowed her mistake in time. He might guess she did not love Sir Richard, but as long as she didn’t say it, he couldn’t speak of it either; and it was better that way. At least Matthew and Lavinia might be happy.

“We are all so fond of you. I’m sure Papa would have gone into a state of collapse if he lost his heir,” she said instead.

“After all, who knows how ghastly the next available cousin might be?” Matthew said. Mary looked at him, but the dark cloud had gone out of his face, and the self-mockery in his voice was only a little bitter. “He might be a mere barrister.”

A smile quivered at Mary’s lips, but she didn’t let it free. “He might be a fishmonger,” she replied, quite as solemn as Matthew. 

“He might be an American,” said Matthew, with a shudder. 

The wind blew a strand of Mary’s loosened hair across her mouth. She removed it, and said, “Now I call that ungentlemanly.” 

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he sounded truly contrite. “I forget your mother’s American. But he might be… Australian, this ghastly cousin.”

“Thank God Downton’s been spared his antipodean crimes,” Mary replied.

“They haven’t transported criminals since 1868,” Matthew assured her.

“Worse and worse!” she cried. “Not only a criminal, but _old_! I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Surely they would have no hope that you to marry him, were he old,” Matthew said.

Mary began to push the chair again. Doubtless Granny would see a new heir as a golden opportunity for just that, even if he were ninety years old. But she didn’t want to put it to Matthew that way: he might just think it was another reason to be sorry he wasn’t dead. “But of course they can’t expect anything of that sort now that I’m engaged,” she said. 

“Of course,” Matthew agreed. 

The chair wheels squeaked as Mary pushed it over a tree root in the lawn. “In any case,” she said. “A new heir couldn’t be _you_ ; and even if he were young and handsome and brought untold millions to Downton, he would be ghastly just for that.” 

Matthew didn’t reply. But he put his hand over hers on the chair handle, and he held it there a few seconds. The wind blew up again, and plucked the leaf from Mary’s hair; and Mary, with an abandon she had not allowed herself since her first Season, chased it across the lawn to get it back. 

“Is it the right one?” Matthew called. “They all look alike to me.” 

She walked back, her decorum restored, and lowered her head so he could put the leaf back in place. His fingers were gentle against her hair. “It is now,” she said, straightening, and touching to leaf to ensure it was in the right place. She grasped the chair handle again. “Where to next?”

**Author's Note:**

> The Rupert Brooke poem Mary quotes is called "Unfortunate," while the Byron poem that she misquotes is "She Walks in Beauty." 
> 
> And Brooke was indeed a looker, although with his fair hair probably no one ever compared him to the night.


End file.
